2018-07-23

hike-writing and hike-coding

I was off the grid for a few days, but I took opportunities when others were hiking to sit at the Hütte and do some writing in the spectroscopic-parallax (or spectroscopic estimates of luminosity and distance) project. I have structured the paper in our new style, which is to lay out all assumptions clearly at the beginning and then find the method that flows from those assumptions. If no method flows, new or different or additional assumptions are needed. This makes the subjectivity clear, but also protects us from the complaint that there are implicit assumptions. A referee can object to the assumptions but (we hope) not the method given the assumptions.

I also worked out with Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) the details of the simplest possible inference of dynamics from element abundances. The idea is to find the dynamical model that makes the abundances a function (only) of the dynamical actions (or other invariants). For the demonstration project, we are just going to do vertical dynamics, and just with very simple moments of the abundance distribution. I built and tested a leap-frog integrator to integrate the vertical orbits.